Love, Home Office and Multitasking

Presence does not ensure presence. Sufficient and not necessary condition, often the present body is confused with the presence.

Long ago it used to be said that one had to differentiate the amount of time from the quality of it. Attention time, for human beings, is a short time. They try to increase it through meditation and other techniques, but right now it is in free fall.

The home office somewhat improvisedly combines a post-pandemic lifestyle with family and work all in one. You can be "at home" but working more than ever. With the family present, but far from being present in body and soul. This appeal to the soul sounds strange in the 21st century. But it is evident that the body is not enough to account for the presence.

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Today, physical presence is not enough

What's more, it is known that you can even have "virtual sex". You can be unfaithful by keeping messages with someone without even having kissed. Without even “eye contact”, as they say now.

Personally, it does not sound so strange to me, since in the 18th century an epistolary life was carried out that could address everything from passionate love to lifelong friendships. The famous Madame de Sevigne and her transcendence through her letters to her daughter, as well as Victoria Ocampo, in Argentina, director of the magazine Sur, and whose correspondence I think has been more prolific than his published literary works for the public, they account for a "virtual" aspect, if we can homologate it to what is now the link in a "non-public" way. face-to-face”.

In fact, today we handle that material, left by Sigmund Freud, through letters and writings. The epistolary activity was more frequent than the presence, in the times when social activity was considered “face-to-face”.

Writing takes time, but much less than moving from one country to another. This limitation was not an impediment to the encounter between human beings and the possibility of sharing and even agreeing on common ideas, activities, passions, many kilometers away.

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Distance

A couple today can share a work company, children, daily routines, without shortening the distance between two human beings.. This distance is usually a conventional distance, and variable, from one social group to another, according to studies that have been carried out, for example, among those who attend a stadium, to witness an activity sporty.

In everyday life, one coincides spatially in a public means of locomotion, as well as in bars, and places of gastronomy, without modifying the space that separates one person from the world from another. Touching the reality of the other is something that love and literature do.

The comfort of "as if" one were there, in the kiss, in the squeeze that is not accidental and annoying, suspends all encounters. The world of objects and routines continues beyond the outdated traditions that are now occupied by the gadgets that the market offers and controls.

The blockade, seen as a new distance mechanism, typical of the era of WhatsApp and networks, is not only a possibility of virtual reality, but something that takes place in everyday life, when a body is submerged in the distance of millimeters that the comfortable way of being allows it to choose as company.

And the other is there but does not attract. It's all too available, but in a misleading way. It is in body, but in a body closed to the other. "Object body" blocking effect.

“I thought she wanted him, but I didn't tell her. We were sitting next to each other, but each one in his own comfort and that created a distance ”. Getting around that distance was difficult because we had it naturalized...”.

Now we realized that we had stopped hugging, because being comfortable was defeating the pleasure of being with the other in a hug and a kiss”.

opportunity makes the lover

But not every bodily encounter is opportune to generate desire. Because desire feeds on what is missing.

Space is a variable linked to the body. And when space is modified, unified and loses symbolic dimensions, it is only at the expense of something. The desire.

Missing the other is a task that must be worked on when curiosity has been satisfied in such a way that it blocks desire.

There is no stipulated economy to cement desire. There is what the shadows of doubts serve to feed it. Or to cover his absence.

The presence is not without the absence. In indecipherable degrees of interchangeability since the contingent flies over the human world.

Blocking someone from contact zero, can simply be living with the strange as known, with the intimate as the most alien. We well know that when a couple separates, they find themselves with the stranger that they could not visualize before.

You see what you want to see until reality creates obstacles that end up making a relationship impossible. Or we can think that a life is the way in which reality is avoided in order to continue seeing what one wishes to see.

“The wall that separated us was not made of bricks. It was usual. It was impossible for me to get through it."

Few true words take place in the midst of the slimy verbal tangle and the supposed good manners... People who get excited in sordid environments. The sordid does not exclude something of the agalmatic.

The body is not an excuse for meetings, we already know that. Saying "present" requires putting aside the ability not to blend in with nothing. It is no coincidence that the most common word in my country is “boludo”.

A boludo is someone who blends in. Who is in his world, in his limbo. That he gets together with others to continue playing that role of not committing himself, for example. Who doesn't realize. You can play the fool with a body, a while. But that time of putting the body and nothing else leaves a hole.

Desire inhabits a body or it does not inhabit it. It leaves him free to be a mere object of support for the gazes or actions of others.

In the world of multitasking there is a "do everything" without grabbing anything.

This tends to be identified with a “feminine” way of doing things, due to the fact that men could not do two things at the same time.

This criterion seems unconvincing to me. Rather, it would be necessary to see how to make viable this new coexistence between absent presences and present absences.

The symbolic order has been the human task par excellence to delimit spaces and functions.

We will have to start making decisions about what we want for our way of life, do not take us by surprise. Absence, when it is space available between two people, generates the desire for a reunion. The presence can be a material substrate where the desire that inhabits the human being is disguised as habits and obligations.

In a world inhabited by profiles and avatars, it is a world where the coordinates of love must be found again.